Jamie Clarke, co-founder of Calgary-based LiveOutThere.com, is an optimist. Only an optimist would create a career of being a “Professional Adventurer”, and, some would argue, only optimists throw themselves head first into selling online in Canada.

Canada: A Land of eCommerce Opportunity

Fortunately, Canada is a land of optimists! And Canada is a land of e-commerce opportunities! Jamie noted in today’s podcast interview that 70% of Canadians want to buy online but only 17% of Canadian companies offer a viable e-commerce option.

I recently interviewed Jamie and his VP of Marketing, Dave Nagy, about how they expanded from one successful store to a booming e-commerce operation, instead of opening more store branches.

If you’ve been thinking of selling online in Canada, get going now!

The market is still so under-developed that you’ll have very few competitors.

You’ll have time to make some mistakes and learn from them before your competitors.

You can establish a dominant position in the marketplace and sell to an audience that is hungry to buy products online.

It may not be an ideal way to get started, but it works OK at the beginning, and costs you little to start learning what online customers want.

Next, they got data feeds from suppliers, which let them show much more product on the website than they actually had in stock. Again, it’s not ideal, because sometimes the supplier’s feeds were wrong (i.e. a product ordered might be out of stock) and it would take a bit longer to get the shipment to the customer. But again, Canadians are so under-served that we’ll put up with a lot, especially from a new online store.

What if it Just Cannibalizes Business From Our Stores?

It won’t. If anything, it is likely to grow your in-store traffic. LiveOutThere found that having an online presence made more Calgarians aware of the store, so it brought in new foot traffic as well as adding online sales.

How Can We Hire People Who Know About eCommerce?

Most important, as with a bricks & mortar operation, hire people whose values and vision align with yours. You’ll be able to attract great people if you have a strong vision that they can relate to. At LiveOutThere, it is very clear:

“We have a mission to inspire Canadians to go and play in this great playground that we call Canada”

That vision (and, I suspect, Jamie’s charm) was enough to convince Dave Nagy to work for months with no pay, even though he had plenty of well-paid job options available to him.

How Do We Avoid Customer Service Problems?

One of my first bosses told me “about 2% of the people will find away around your rules, no matter how careful you are, so design for the other 98%“. (Some day, remind me to tell you my Zoo Crew campaign story on that topic!)

Jamie and Dave have a similar view. “We make rules in our company for the customers; not for the people who break rules.”

Get Selling Online Now!

What would make it easier for you to sell online? What are the biggest hurdles you face? Please comment below (or send me an email (tema(at)frankonlinemarketing.com) if you are too shy to comment publicly!)

Tema Frank has been helping businesses and organizations market themselves more effectively on the Internet since the late 1990s. In 2001 she founded Web Mystery Shoppers Inc., one of the world's first remote usability testing companies, and one of the very few to do large-sample size usability testing.

In 2012 she launched the Frank Online Marketing Show, a weekly podcast devoted to helping Canadian companies become more successful online.

She has taught e-marketing at the University of Alberta and the Université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour (in France), given seminars and workshops on the topic, and written about how the internet can help businesses sell more and communicate better.

She is also the author of the best-selling book, "Canada's Best Employers for Women: A guide for job-hunters, employees and employers."